We exist as holograms: Cook excerpt #20

Nick Cook writes: All I could say up to the end of my Phase 2 research with any beyond-reasonable- doubt conviction - that passed muster for me - was that consciousness was primary and extraordinary evidence existed for the survival of our ‘individual consciousness’.

I had gone as far as the research would allow. The more refined picture derived from across the project was that consciousness didn’t just survive; it continued – it had no beginning and no end; it just was. We exist as holograms in a holographic universe that is, in effect, ‘alive’. The next question was, were we - if by ‘we’ we mean an entity with intact awareness and aspects of the personality that we enjoy in this life?

To go beyond this point, I needed to address two questions: How/why phenomena project as ‘rogue icons’ on the screen of our ‘user interface? And: what conditions underwrite the ‘conditional reality’ effects that manifest as paranormal phenomena?

This impasse brought me to the second reason for my interest in Edgar Mitchell.

In addition to founding, in 1973, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organisation that brings scientific rigour to the exploration of mind and consciousness, he had been instrumental in setting up a body called ‘FREE’ - the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences⁶¹.

"Nature's Mind: The Quantum Hologram"  

FREE theorises that all types of contact with what it calls ‘non-human intelligences’, including the departed – might actually be a single phenomenon that should be studied holistically. In this, it endorses what Pim van Lommel and others had concluded about the near-death experience: that experiences of the OBE, SDE and NDE variety were underpinned by a core, continuous aspect of consciousness.

FREE has gathered data across a range of what it refers to as ‘contact modalities’ – NDEs, remote viewing, shamanic encounters, channelling and others – that had, it said, yielded ‘numerous commonalities and variables’. One day, it hoped that these data would allow it to develop a ‘viable hypothesis for a possible unification theory of consciousness and contact with non-human intelligence’.

Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model had allowed me to visualise how reality presented itself to us – by giving us just enough for us to be able to handle. Any more and we might undergo perhaps what is known as a ‘consciousness shift’.

We talk about consciousness shifts all the time, mostly without stopping to think what this actually means.

With deep, fundamental change in the world around us, we seem to be going through such a shift right now – and the appearance of unfamiliar icons on our user- interface may be indicative that ‘new lines of code’ are rewriting our whole conception of reality. For pointers to this, we need look no further than the acknowledgment in the Director of National Intelligence’s report to the US Congress⁶², delivered this June, that the UFO phenomenon (or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ in the parlance of the report) is real.

The subjective experience is no longer the pariah that it was, without place in the experimenter’s laboratory. Quantum mechanics – with its pivotal acknowledgment of the ‘observer in the loop’ - tells us how wrong it is that this was ever allowed to be.

FREE’s ‘contact modalities’ were heresy by any scientific yardstick, but since I was now beyond the view that mainstream science had primacy in any claim to providing us with a picture of the true nature of reality, I found myself looking at the ‘modalities’ as a tool that might, possibly, allow my research to go beyond Phase 2 to a Phase 3 - by probing the corner of the reality envelope beyond the last thing mainstream science currently acknowledges to be real: the in/out virtual particles of the zero- point energy field. This is where the final part of my research ultimately took me.

61 http://www.experiencer.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Initial-Research-Data-Summary-FREE.pdf
62 https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.